tommorris

I've seen one or two people using the Switch on the London Underground. Rare but not non-existent.

It is a criminal offence under s9 of the Bail Act 1976 to agree to indemnify a bail surety. If Assange's guarantors had entered into an agreement with Assange, that agreement would have been illegal under English criminal law, and thus an unenforceable contract.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1976/63/section/9

Canada has their own version of the OGL too. Dunno about Australia.

https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada

This goes a little off-topic, but you might be pleasantly surprised about Crown Copyright.

Crown Copyright doesn't deal with university research, only with works done by the government. Pretty much everything released by central government is now licensed through the UK Government Licensing Framework under the Open Government License (OGL), which is essentially CC-BY.

See http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licen...

Examples of loads of photos and documents that Wikimedia have taken copies of (and often reusing) under the OGL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:OGL

We've solved the trusted-third-party problem by having a trusted-third-party (i.e. the lawyer).

All hail blockchain as the most amazing non-solution to the problem.

Took this guy $177 to register a Delaware corporation called Stripe Inc and get Comodo to issue him an EV certificate that looks exactly like the real payment gateway. After Comodo revoked his cert, GoDaddy gave him one.

https://stripe.ian.sh/

EV certificates tell you that a site is owned by a company with a particular name, not that it is the company you actually want. There's a reason browser vendors are de-emphasising EV: it isn't very useful.

During the process of drafting the legislation, at least here in America, the existing players have a voice on the legislation's course, and the larger the existing player is, the louder their voice gets to be.

Sounds like you need campaign finance and lobbying regulations. ;-)

My comparison is simply to show the standard laissez faire talking point of "oh, regulation exists just to protect incumbent market players" as bullshit: regulations exist to protect consumers from negligence and misbehaviour on the part of the companies.

The fact you think GDPR only applies to websites rather than the huge clusterfuck of personal data loss means you haven't understood the reason behind GDPR.

Equifax lost millions and millions of records and have so far faced no meaningful punishment from the UK regulators: as far as I can tell, they've so far made one brief statement on their website, and one tweet.

Major ISPs like TalkTalk lost millions of records (and ignored security researchers telling them about gaping security holes) and were given a slap on the wrist - £400,000 by the UK ICO. Mere pennies per user in fines; a drop in the bucket compared to their annual revenue. There is no economic interest to change their behaviour.

The negligence of these companies has led to millions of people having their personal and financial data stolen, having to keep eagle-eyed over bank statements and credit cards, having to worry that their transactions (or their travel bookings) might get flagged up as suspicious, that their credit rating gets eaten, and much else besides.

If a company you've entrusted your personal data with—not just your tweets or whatever, but sensitive personal data including health data, data about your religious affiliation, sexual orientation, etc. loses that data, as a UK citizen, you currently have no right to appeal the ICO failing to take action. GDPR/DPA2018 changes that balance.

Companies tell consumers "hey, trust us with your personal data". Consumers do in the false belief that there is some protection or basic responsibility taken. When they colossally fail to take the most basic steps to protect consumers from data loss, the status quo was this: nothing happens to them.

Glad you can tell how regulation affects a market after less than one day of being active law, and zero enforcement actions or cases suggesting how courts/regulators are going to interpret the rules.

I was thinking about getting in to the car market but all these pesky requirements that I sell a car with airbags and seatbelts and fuel efficiency compliance are just there to protect existing incumbents.

Good luck arguing that novel legal theory when in front of a judge on a fraud or tax evasion trial.

Yes, acaí berries are tasty and make a lovely addition to a healthy breakfast. Cryptocurrencies are Internet penny stocks with lofty aspirations.

It is a cheap substitute. But you should try the cheap substitute: its not half bad and lots of people seem to find it pretty tasty.

The reason people use Signal over WhatsApp is partly because of a perception it is more likely to be good against malicious state-like actors: tyrannical regimes etc.

If said malicious actors pwn the phone of the person you were talking to, suddenly they have a pretty good way of mapping a contact called "My Best Friend" to a human through billing records.

Or even easier, they type the phone number into Google and find that the Syrian dissident they've just arrested has been corresponding with the NYTimes or BBC.

If they know only that they are talking to anonymoushackzor@gmail.com they could, uh, get Google to release their IP address. Google are fairly unlikely to honour a legal demand for disclosure from Libya or North Korea or some other tyrannical/fucked-up hellhole.

I like Signal, but I'm not totally sure about the threat model.

you can add pgp on top of it if you want security

Nobody does, sadly.

Baking it into the protocol like Signal and WhatsApp did means nobody has to want it, they just get it included without having to bolt on any extras.

I don't know that I have a better design in mind

Simple: usernames. Humans are not phone numbers. Phone numbers are the IP addresses of legacy phone networks.

For science articles, yes. That took a lot of lobbying and complaining.

On law/crime articles, they don't link to legal judgments. That's partly the fault of the British legal system for not publishing a lot of that material. But there are plenty of times when it is available and it doesn't get linked to.

Hypertext is a thing. One day people will work out all the amazing possibilities.

Sounds pretty similar to SQ3R. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R

If you don't want to add them yourself, be sure to leave a note.

Notes are basically bug reports for OSM. See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Notes

If a philosopher isn't available, a lawyer would probably be qualified as well.

The lawyers are busy explaining to the "smart contracts" people that trying to translate contract law into code is going to produce a whole lot more comedy than it is practical value.

I don't remember any othe philosopher adopting that stance.

Peter Unger's book "Ignorance" (Oxford University Press, 1975) is probably the best modern defence of extreme skepticism.

Also, Unger is pretty fun to read.

you should be the first to point out this doesn't imply causation

Nah, I'd rather just go nuclear on causation, with the assistance of Hume...

"...experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connexion, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable... It is allowed on all hands that there is no known connexion between the sensible qualities and the secret powers; and consequently, that the mind is not led to form such a conclusion concerning their constant and regular conjunction, by anything which it knows of their nature."

There's some evidence that philosophy majors score pretty high on the GMAT (for graduate admissions to business school) and on the LSAT (for law school), as well as pretty good on the GRE Verbal and GRE Analytical Writing tests.

Less good at the GRE Quantitative Reasoning than all the science disciplines (and economics) but better than the rest of the arts and humanities subjects (and better than accounting, which is slightly worrying).

See http://dailynous.com/value-of-philosophy/charts-and-graphs/

Also: https://www.salon.com/2013/07/01/be_employable_study_philoso...

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/why-philosophy-majors-...

(I may be biased on this though: I have a BA and MA in Philosophy.)

The point of CC0 is that in countries (like the US) with the concept of releasing works into the public domain—relinquishing all copyright claims on the work, that's what you are doing with CC0.

In countries where you can't legally release works into the public domain, CC0 is a license that tries to do as much as it can through a license in those countries.

Seeing two straight people getting married or discussing their romantic relationship isn't an adult topic, but seeing two gay people doing the same is treated as one.

Nobody is talking about adult or mature-rated LGBT content, they are talking about the disparity in treatment between non-adult content containing LGBT themes vs. non-adult content that doesn't contain LGBT themes.

Pure whataboutery. The fact that a significantly worse harm happens in other countries doesn't mean this isn't something people are allowed to discuss.

Pretty sure user anger didn't stop the prevalence of pop-up Punch The Monkey adverts. The massive rise in adblocking forced the ad industry to stop being quite so obnoxious.

So, yeah, relying on advertisers to not piss off users is a bit much given their business model relies on interrupting your attention.

The Series 1 'Edition' watches were $10-17k and in gold. When Series 2 came out, they switched the gold to ceramic and they start at $1,249.

The gold ones were definitely for sale both online, in the shops, and in department stores (one of the big London department stores has an Apple Watch counter).

Personally, I think it was more of a marketing gimmick: send a few out to celebrities for some buzz in the fashion press, and get the tech press to write about how Apple are "going after the Rolex end of the watch market"... even if they don't sell many, it was good PR for the first series of watches.

And for consumers, they could try the gold one on in the shop, sigh that they don't have $10,000 and then buy the $300-$500 one.

Their education (at least in theory) prepares them to be contributors to society after they graduate.

That assumption seems to be in doubt.

https://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2014/7/9/5885433/n...

http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/03/09/1046687/

https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/vvan54/how-much-is-a-d...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/sports/13cnd-auburn.html?m...

http://www.npr.org/2012/11/17/165345780/online-courses-keep-...

magically just works

If we use Bitcoin as an example, it magically just works by consuming a pretty extravagant amount of electricity for the miners/nodes to run.